چکیده:
The present study has aimed at finding out whether or not students’ language background and gender bring about a distinction between the frequency and types of metadiscourse elements occurring in their papers. To this end, a dataset of 40 student papers in four series written by native male, nonnative male, native female, and nonnative female writers was analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of the use of metadiscourse resources following the metadiscourse model proposed by Hyland and Tse (2004). The results of the frequency count and chi-square tests (p-value<0.05) revealed more or less notable differences in the overall employment of metadiscourse markers in the two major types of metadiscourse resources (i.e., interactive and interactional) and the categories related to each type (i.e., transitions, frame markers, etc. versus hedges, boosters, attitude markers, etc., respectively) by the four groups of university students.
خلاصه ماشینی:
com Abstract The present study has aimed at finding out whether or not students’ language background and gender bring about a distinction between the frequency and types of metadiscourse elements occurring in their papers.
Vassileva (2001) compared Bulgarian and English research articles and found substantial differences between the two languages regarding the use of metadiscourse elements.
Crismore, Markkanen, and Steffensen (1993) investigated texts written by Finnish and English native writers in terms of metadiscourse elements and explain the observed differences from the perspective of sociocultural motivations.
It has been found that male and female writers resort to different linguistic resources in their academic writing in order to express themselves and communicate with peer researchers (Tannen, 1994; Herring, Johnson & Dibenedetto, 1995; Holmes, 1995).
This study seeks to compare employment of metadiscourse resources – namely, interactive and interactional ones with their sub-categories as proposed by Hyland (2005) -- in student papers written by university students with different language backgrounds (i.
The study further attempts to bridge the gap in the literature regarding the interaction of language background and gender in the use of metadiscourse elements in a written academic genre, namely, student papers.
Discussion and Conclusion The results of the study support the view that metadiscourse is a universal aspect of academic writing since all types of metadiscourse elements were found in the four texts written by the four groups of writers.
The findings further revealed that the writers’ gender and language background could influence the frequency of use as well as the type of metadiscourse elements they might employ in their academic papers.